Hercules, shield a soldier from harm.
The natives were packed too tightly to use their weapons properly. A warrior stabbed overhand at the tribune’s face with an all-iron spear very different from the darts which had fallen on the legion’s advance. Instead of a shaft, this stabbing weapon was forged in one piece with two double-edged blades joined back to back by a rod no longer than a sword hilt.
The warrior’s face was painted in quadrants — red, green, blue and a yellow turned fiery by the tone of the skin beneath it. Vibulenus ducked and raised his shield in the same motion. Wood split and the spearpoint reached an inch through the felt backing: the natives might be skinny, but they were not frail.
Instead of trying to slash around the edge of his opponent’s buckler, painted in the same pattern as his face, the tribune stabbed directly at the center where the four colors met. Spanish steel slid through leather and the wicker frame with little more delay than it had made of the paint. Even dazed by the blow to his head, Vibulenus’ eye had correctly gauged the flimsiness of the equipment beside the sprawled corpse.
The warrior screeched as the sword grated through the bones of his hand. He would have jumped backward, but the press of his fellows was too great.
Vibulenus put all his weight behind the swordhilt. His point met ribs and drove on into the chest cavity. His opponent cleared his own weapon with a hysterical jerk and flailed behind him with it. The victims he slashed down fell too late to provide him with any space but that he died on.
Shouting, the tribune leaped into the gap, joined on the carpet of squirming bodies by a legionary who had retained a javelin for thrusting.
His head did not hurt. The memories — Pompilius Rufus . . . Helvius in coruscating death . . . a centurion with no name, no legs, and no hope but the false one of Gaius Vibulenus — they were still present, but flows of molten glass insulated the tribune from that greater pain also.
There should have been a place other than battle where he could be free of pain, fear, and all-consuming hatred for his fate — as well as for the guild which was that fate. Vibulenus had found no other release its equal, though.
When he drank, it turned memories into nightmares until he awakened drenched with his own sweat and vomit. The fellowship of Clodius and Niger, friends as no one would have been his friend under circumstances his birth made normal, were constant reminders of other men who had died around him, beside him, even for him . . . and for no human purpose.
A soldier shouldn’t talk of love and should never think of it . . . but for all that, Vibulenus found something not far from peace occasionally in Quartilla’s arms. But there were memories in that, too, and knowledge of what she was as surely as he was a Roman and a soldier. The only purity he found in life was in slaughter. He knew the feeling did not come from a healthy mind; but it was no less real for that.
For now — Vibulenus chopped overarm at a warrior who had interposed his own stabbing spear. Steel bit deeply into thin iron, but the native expertly spun his weapon like a whirled baton to bring forward an undamaged blade. The tribune punched forward his shield, knocking the enemy shield aside, then swung low. His sword cut its own depth in the warrior’s shield rim and stopped only because, nearer its tip, the blade had crunched into the native’s femur.
Vibulenus brought the iron-bound edge of his shield down as he stepped over his fallen opponent. Bones and teeth splintered at the blow; and another warrior, with a clear look at the tribune’s torso, thrust with all his strength.
Vibulenus pitched backward off the quivering body which his hobnails gouged. There was a dent in his breastplate, centered and between the fifth and sixth ribs. The iron spearpoint had doubled back for three inches. While the warrior tried to swap ends for another stroke, a legionary crushed his face with the ferule of a javelin.